A sort of thesis

Sun Jan 17 04:57:49 CST 2016

On 16.01.2016 18:50, Steven Koteff wrote:

> Good side discussion, then, might be: What are books you consider 
> Great despite, or maybe because of, being very small? (As if there 
> aren't enough short stories.)
>

R.D. Brinkmann: Keiner weiß mehr
Emil Cioran: Le Mauvais démiurge
Emil Cioran: Écartèlement
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Rainald Goetz: Loslabern
Knut Hamsun: Hunger
E.T.A. Hoffmann: Prinzessin Brambilla
Yasushi Inoue: Der Tod des Teemeisters
Ernst Jünger: Das abenteuerliche Herz (The Adventurous Heart)
Ernst Jünger: Gläserne Bienen (The Glass Bees)
Franz Kafka: Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis)
Christian Kracht: Faserland
Christian Kracht: 1979
Christian Kracht: Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten
Christian Kracht: Imperium
Thomas Mann: Der Erwählte (The Holy Sinner)
Thomas Mann: Die Betrogene (The Black Swan)
Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49
L. v. Sacher-Masoch: Venus im Pelz
Kurt Vonnegut: Mother Night
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five

>
> On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 11:47 AM, Steven Koteff 
> <steviekoteff at gmail.com <mailto:steviekoteff at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Just reading over that. Should've edited that a lot. Sorry guys.
>     Wrote it on a cell phone while walking around Wicker Park. I mean
>     to say, by the way, I entertain the idea /Finnegans Wake /is
>     Greater than /Ulysses/.
>
>     I know a lot of people, by the way, who value nothing in the world
>     above literature, and whose stomachs churn at discussions of
>     Greatness that involve comparisons, hierarchies, etc.
>
>     On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 11:40 AM, Steven Koteff
>     <steviekoteff at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>         I think there are probably very reasonable reasons why the
>         size and scope of a novel--if they don't dictate real vitality
>         and life affirmation and craft and greatness--might correlate
>         with some like Greatness Frequency Index. A billion caveats,
>         most of which you can easily imagine and which I grant.
>
>         I started becoming a Pynchon devotee when I was in college. He
>         was a gradual progression on a reading arc of mine that lent
>         me to ever (you might call)excessive/(I might call)expansive
>         novels. Preceding Pynchon for me were, like, DFW (I am one of
>         the people around here who thinks Infinite Jest is Great but I
>         haven't read it in like five years so who knows; and I'd
>         consider adding Pale King even in its published form, with its
>         phantom bits, to the list, like The Castle), Tolstoy (Karenina
>         also big and Great), Joyce (I have read only bits of it Mark
>         but I at least entertain the idea that it's Greater than
>         Ulysses even if I don't necessarily agree; a smart reader of
>         Ulysses can reasonably read it smoothly enough or submit to it
>         enough that there is active real-time investment in the story
>         and characters that offers that magical/primitive pleasure of
>         self-transcendence by caring about an unreal world, to the
>         point that you forget you exist in a different one, or exist
>         at all; I have read a few bits of Finnegans Wake but not
>         enough to know if that can be experienced in FW; and if that
>         pleasure is sacrificed, I'm not saying it can't be made up for
>         in the other Great things created by the same extremer density
>         of FW that allows for its other/Greater qualities; just that I
>         haven't read enough of FW to know if that's the case; fuck
>         Ulysses is so good).
>
>         I then went to grad school to study fiction writing at a
>         program that was basically three years of living in an arts
>         colony that consisted of a lot of very close but personally
>         and interpersonally tumultuous people who spent abnormal
>         amounts of time discussing the art and practice of crafting
>         the perfect story. Often on a level that was so elemental,
>         conceptual, informed, sophisticated, and yet concerned with
>         primality, that you could've read it as spiritual. And from
>         that perspective, the scope of something like GR, it's
>         wildness, excesses (on the level of language, size, plot,
>         etc.) are not only rebellious but also deeply connected to the
>         spirit/uality/philosophy/life-affirmativeness (as you might
>         call it) of the book that also makes it Great, I think. To the
>         extent that the size and scope are actually a part of the
>         spirit and the Greatness. Now, I don't think a book has to
>         have a similar size and Scope to be Great. I think what's more
>         true is that the size and scope be perfectly attuned to the
>         particular requirements of the perspective the book is taking.
>         Maybe when spirit, craft, talent, and vision all combine to
>         create something Great, it even slightly more often requires a
>         book huge in size.
>
>
>
>
>         > On Jan 16, 2016, at 9:42 AM, Mark Kohut
>         <mark.kohut at gmail.com <mailto:mark.kohut at gmail.com>> wrote:
>         >
>         > As I went on to say, size and scope matters in making my case...
>         >
>         > yeah, just a so what discussion to have.
>         >
>         > A feeling about Ambition of theme re all.
>         >
>         >
>         >> On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 10:35 AM, john bove
>         <malignd at gmx.com <mailto:malignd at gmx.com>> wrote:
>         >> In what way is Finnegans Wake greater than Ulysses or ATD
>         than GR?  My
>         >> answer would be in no ways.
>         >>
>         >> I prefer Faustus to Magic Mountain and Dog Years to Tin
>         Drum.  Bt so what?
>         >>
>         >> And have you actually "read" Finnegans Wake?  NOt doubting,
>         only curious.
>         >>
>         >>
>         >> Sent: Saturday, January 16, 2016 at 6:13 AM
>         >> From: "Mark Kohut" <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
>         >> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>         >> Subject: A sort of thesis
>         >> There are a few "big" books that have the status
>         >> of great novels that all cluster in my head in the same
>         >> place.
>         >>
>         >> Moby Dick, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, The Man Without
>         >> Qualities, The Tin Drum, The Golden Notebook, Gravity's
>         >> Rainbow, Portrait of a Lady, Middlemarch, Cairo Trilogy,
>         Radetzky March
>         >> and like that.
>         >> Swap out or add others, we can do.
>         >>
>         >> Proust in seven volumes is in a class by itself because of
>         length.
>         >> (Some say first three volumes equivalent to the above
>         bracketing?)
>         >>
>         >> But I think the two most ambitious novels in English,
>         perhaps, the only ones
>         >> I can think of this morning, that might be 'great' in even
>         larger ways
>         >> than the above
>         >> are Finnegan's Wake and Against the Day.
>         >>
>         >> Argue with me. Find others?
>         >> -
>         >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>         >> - Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>         > -
>         > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>
>

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